June 25, 1948 The United States, Great Britain and France began the Berlin Airlift of food and supplies to the German city in defiance of the Soviet Union’s blockade of the roads. At the height of the Airlift, two groups of planes flew in four-hour blocks around the clock.While one group of aircraft was loaded and serviced, the other group was in the air. On the 264-mile route, 32 aircraft were in the air simultaneously. Supplies would be quickly unloaded and the aircraft would return for more food, fuel and other necessities for the 2.5 million West Berliners. It was the most ambitious aerial supply operation in history. The Soviet blockade was not lifted until the following May but the airlift continued for four months more. Berliners watch a plane involved in the Berlin Airlift bringing food and supplies About the Berlin Airlift
June 24, 1948 In Washington, D.C. President Harry Truman signed the Selective Service Act, creating a system for registering all men ages 18-25, and drafting them into the armed forces as the nation’s military needs required.
June 24, 1948 In Germany, the Soviet Union denied permission for Allied (U.S., France or Great Britain) forces to travel over Soviet-controlled territory to reach Allied-controlled West Berlin; the roads were allegedly closed for repairs and electricity was cut off to West Berlin. This was a blockade of food and all other supplies to the western enclave within East Germany and its population of more than two million.
June 24, 1970 The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution, which had authorized the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States,” was used by President Lyndon Johnson, absent a formal congressional, and constitutional, declaration of war, to justify open-ended pursuit of war in Vietnam. The resolution was passed in August, 1964 following a provocation by the U.S. destroyer Maddox in North Vietnamese territorial waters, which was portrayed as aggressive military action by North Vietnamese PT boats.
June 24, 1980 A general strike was held in El Salvador against death squads, primarily military or paramilitary units carrying out political assassinations and intimidation as part of the Salvadoran government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Salvadoran death squad destroying a village The U.S. government helped fund and train Salvadoran police forces. Questioned about the nature of the aid in a Senate hearing, Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs Elliott Abrams said, “I think that government has earned enough trust, as I think we have earned enough trust, not to be questioned, frankly, about exporting torture equipment. But I would certainly be in favor of giving it to them if they want it.” Noam Chomsky on El Salvador
June 23, 1683 “Tamanend,” sculpture by Raymon Sandoval, 1995, Front & Market Street in Philadelphia. Chief Tamanend (The Affable), leader of the Pennsylvania’s thirteen Lenni-Lenape tribes, and other chiefs went to Philadelphia to meet with William Penn. Penn wished to buy four parcels of land (most of current Montgomery County), and the chiefs agreed to the sale, each making their mark on the deeds which had been translated for them. Soon thereafter, Penn met with Tamanend at Shakamaxon under a large tree later known as the Treaty Elm. Penn said, “We have come here with a hearty desire to live with you in peace . . . We believe you will deal kindly and justly by us, and we will deal kindly and justly by you . . . .” Tamanend offered, “We will live in love with William Penn and his children, as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”
June 23, 1963 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. led a massive march down Detroit’s Woodward Avenue followed by a speech to a rally in Cobo Hall. The speech was essentially the same as that he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. two months later, known as “I Have a Dream.” Photo of King speaking in Detroit from the Wayne State University’s Reuther Archive.
June 23, 1966 High school students in Grenada, Mississippi, tried to purchase tickets in the downstairs “white” section of the local movie theatre. Black moviegoers had always been required to sit in the balcony under Jim Crow segregationist laws. When they were refused tickets, they sat down on the sidewalk in front of the theatre. Fifteen were arrested, including Jim Bulloch, a Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) organizer, who was charged with “inciting to riot.” Jim Bulloch, one of the SCLC organizers in Grenada, Mississippi Grenada Mississippi, 1966, Chronology of a Movement
June 23, 1972 Life magazine published a photo by Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut of children running from an attack with Napalm, an incendiary chemical weapon used widely by U.S. forces to burn out the jungle, thus eliminating cover (foliage) for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. Napalm, a sticky mixture of gasoline, polystyrene and benzene that burns at very high temperature, had been used in WWII and Korea. Read about the photograph
June 23, 1972 The Education Amendments of 1972, commonly known as Title IX, became U.S. law, prohibiting sex discrimination at educational institutions. More infoText of the law
June 23, 1973 The International Court of Justice granted an injunction, requested by the Australia and New Zealand governments, against French nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific.
And no, you can’t get your healthcare at Subway Read on Substack
This cartoon was drawn (in California) for the FXBG Advance. Is it weird to draw a cartoon on Fredericksburg while in California? Not really. I did it in Huntsville, Alabama, and Montreal. I didn’t do one while traipsing the UK, Ireland, and Iceland.
Fredericksburg has lost Moss Free Clinic, and very important, and the only source for many for healthcare.
I covered this issue back in February 2024, way before I even started my Substack.
Creative note: I was out Thursday night in downtown Carlsbad when my editor sent me a few subjects. I knew this was the most important one. I wrote it in my head while having a Modelo. I got it approved the next day (Friday) and drew it that night.
Music note: I listened to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album. (snip)
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Trump orders strike on Iran by Ann Telnaes
Operation Midnight Shammer gets to play strongman Read on Substack
Yesterday Trump announced the bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran, claiming “the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated”.
Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny”, posted on bluesky last night: “Many things reported with confidence in the first hours and days will turn out not to be true”.
The decision to go to war shouldn’t be left to a low-IQ racist, narcissistic toddler with impulse issues. I wonder if our generals feel like Hitler’s generals. In both cases, experienced and trained military professionals had to follow very stupid orders. In Hitler’s case, those orders cost Germany thousands of soldiers, either through death or capture.
Hitler was a veteran while Trump dodged the Vietnam War, citing bone spurs.
To the idiot conspiracy-theory spreading trolls at GoComics believing yesterday’s cartoon signals I’m for bombing Iran, no, morons. How could you come to that conclusion after years of reading my work?
To be clear, I do NOT support starting a war against any nation that hasn’t attacked us. This case is particularly stupid.
Donald Trump is demanding peace from Iran, which has never attacked us, after he dropped massive bombs on it. We HAD peace with Iran.
Years ago, Trump falsely predicted that President Barack Obama would start a war with Iran because he would be incapable of negotiating. Except it was President Obama who successfully negotiated for Iran to end its nuclear program, and the treaty was working. Iran was complying with all the conditions.
It was Trump who canceled the agreement and is now bombing Iran because he’s incapable of negotiating. And why would Iran want to negotiate with Donald Trump when they know they can’t trust him. How many treaties and agreements has Trump broken?
Iran doesn’t have a nuclear bomb today, or Trump and Bibi would not have bombed them. But Donald Trump just taught Iran that they need a nuclear weapon.
We may be slow learners of history, but the Iranians may not be. We forgot the history lessons of Vietnam and invaded Iraq. Iran probably remembers our demands on Iraq and Libya to lose their nuclear programs, only to see their regimes overthrown later.
Another history lesson we’re forgetting is our regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan. How long is Trump prepared to commit US troops to this war? It’ll be a lot longer than Trump will be in office.
Last night, Trump said to the nation, “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” And then he said there are other targets. (snip)
because when the US does these things, they take place in all of our names whether we want it, or not. It’s part of why the power for these things lies in our legislature. The power does not rest with the executive unless the legislature votes to give it.
This summer will mark 80 years since the attacks stunned the world. Today, every one of the crew members who carried out the bombings is dead. Here, one of the last writers to interview them reopens his files
‘It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.”
I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.
We have spent the afternoon looking through wartime logbooks from his 58 overseas combat missions. Now, between servings of dim sum, he is telling me about the 59th, the one that wiped out a city, along with well over 100,000 people.
“The instant the bomb left the bomb bay, we screamed into a steep diving turn to escape the shockwave. There were two – the first, like a very, very, very close burst of flak. Then we turned back to see Hiroshima. But you couldn’t see it. It was covered in smoke, dust, debris. And coming out of it was that mushroom cloud.”
The crew of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay. Stephen Walker interviewed Theodore ‘Dutch’ Van Kirk, navigator (1); Tom Ferebee, bombardier (2); Paul Tibbets, pilot (3); Bob Lewis, co-pilot (4); George ‘Bob’ Caron, tail gunner (5); and Robert Shumard, assistant engineer (6). Photograph: Photogquest/Getty Images
He stops a moment, awe visibly registering on his face. “The city was gone. It was only three minutes since we’d dropped the bomb.”
Van Kirk died in 2014. In the years since we met, all the other crew members who flew on the missions to Hiroshima, and to Nagasaki three days later on 9 August, have also died. Meanwhile, the numbers of hibakusha, those who survived the attacks, are rapidly dwindling. We are passing into a twilight of history. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, this biological fact seems disturbingly relevant. Twenty years ago, the world was a dangerous place. Today, it’s more so. More nations are developing nuclear weapons with few, if any, effective international controls. Tactical nuclear strikes have been explicitly threatened by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. And, just in the last week, war has broken out in the Middle East over fears that Iran may be very close to having a bomb. In such times, perspective matters. The shocked testimony of those like Van Kirk needs to be heard. History has lessons to teach us.
It was this thought that prompted me to reopen my files, to reread the transcripts of interviews with some of the crew members of both attacks. Much of this material was untouched for two decades; nothing relating to the Nagasaki mission was published. Here were some of the last testimonies of those who did the unthinkable. They were in their 80s or 90s, nearing the end of their lives. How did they remember it?
On 4 August 1945, Charles “Don” Albury, a 24-year-old B-29 pilot, was summoned to a secret briefing on Tinian, a Pacific island 1,500 miles south of Japan. Then the biggest bomber base in the world, Tinian was a jump-off point for a conveyor belt of the almost daily destruction of Japan. About 300,000 people had already died and 9 million were now homeless.
But Albury’s outfit had yet to take part in the attacks. Known as the 509th Composite Group, they occupied a secret compound on a far corner of the base. “Security was very, very tight,” Albury told me when I met him at his home in Orlando, Florida. Then aged 83, he grinned mischievously. “I remember one time the base commander got too near one of our planes. A guard nearly shot him.”
Even the 509th’s crews knew nothing about their ultimate missions. And they had been training for almost a year. First in Utah, later on Tinian: “We kept dropping practice bombs and flying these crazy steep turns. We did it day after day. For months.” But nobody told them why, and few dared ask. Those who did could find themselves swiftly dispatched by their leader, Paul Tibbets, a battle-hardened bomber pilot, to hardship posts above the Arctic Circle. “You learned to keep your mouth shut,” said Albury.
But in that 4 August briefing a part of the secret was about to be revealed.
Nine days earlier, on 26 July, President Truman had delivered his ultimatum to Japan in the Potsdam declaration: either surrender unconditionally, or face “prompt and utter destruction”. The means of that destruction was not specified. And Japan had not surrendered.
If I live for 100 years I will never get these few minutes out of my mind
I got a lot from reading and re-reading this. I tried to comment there, but WordPress sigh. Anyway, as a show of respect, here is this. Very good info and commentary
First I sent a thunderstorm to ruin his stupid birthday parade. Now behold! I painted the skies with a rainbow to troll his helicopter for Pride Month!
1. God Hates You, Donold
The White House posted what they thought was a photo showing God’s endorsement: Marine One lifting off with a rainbow in the background.
But as always, the faux-king liars misinterpreted My meaning!
God LOVES LGBTQ+ people!
And I despise that infinite bigot Donold.
Luckily, Gavin Newsom’s press office understood and quote-tweeted it with: “Happy Pride 😌”
2. Their ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Just Collapsed
Trump’s prized “One Big Beautiful Bill” crumbled in the House.
It was supposed to be his grand legislative comeback. Instead, it got nuked by the parliamentarian.
Now the GOP is in full-blown civil war. Fighting over AI, Medicaid cuts, deficit math, and whose bootlicking is most loyal.
On top of all that, Tangerine Palpatine is raging at Fox News because his poll numbers are in the toilet.
Verily, thou mayest eat shit, Donold.
3. God Bless the ACLU
God bless the ACLU, who just won a unanimous court ruling striking down Louisiana’s ludicrous Ten Commandments law.
Public schools are not Sunday schools. And this court had the guts to say it.
Let it be known: while the cult worships golden idols of Donold and demands state-mandated religion, real Americans are still defending the Constitution.
Before you go, I need to say something important. This part isn’t a joke. It’s about survival. (snip-MORE)
June 21, 1877 The Molly Maguires Four members of the Molly Maguires were hung for murder in what was then Mauch Chunk, and in Pottsville, towns in Pennsylvania’s Carbon County. The Molly Maguires was a secret and violent Irish-Catholic organization of coal miners formed to combat the oppressive working and living conditions in the anthracite coal region of the state. Readmore (2 links)
June 21, 1908 A Women’s Sunday Suffrage rally, supporting the right of women to vote, drew several hundred thousand to London’s Hyde Park from all over the country. Women were encouraged to wear “the colours” – white (for purity), green (hope) and purple (dignity) – and in “as fetching, charming and ladylike a manner as possible.” As the Yorkshire Daily Post put it: “At least one half of the crowd was composed of the sort of people you would expect to see at a suburban garden party.” The women’s suffrage movement
June 21, 1964 James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young Freedom Summer workers, disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi, while registering negroes to vote. Their bodies were found six weeks later, having been shot and then buried in an earthen dam. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan eventually went to prison on federal conspiracy charges related to the disappearance; none served more than six years. Schwerner and Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Chaney was a local African-American man who had joined CORE in 1963. Read more and hear versions of Pete Seeger’s song, “Those Three are On My Mind” More on Chaney Read about the movie
June 21, 1997 100,000 marched in solidarity with striking newspaper workers in Detroit after nearly two years on the picket line. support rally march 1, 1997 photo: Paul Felton The Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA) had refused to bargain in good faith (later confirmed by a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board), even after the union members had worked for months without a contract, and the DNA, which ran both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, had begun to impose the changes they had been insisting on at the bargaining table.
Scottie's Playtime 